Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  Every man who observes the fast during the whole month of ramadhan is married by God to a houri of paradise of a special type known as Ḥūr al‘ain (black-eyed houri) and God sets them in a tent hollowed out of a white pearl. Each houri wears seventy veils. Each man has seventy alcoves, each carved out of a red hyacinth. In each alcove are arranged seventy beds; on each bed is a woman awaiting the Chosen One, surrounded by a thousand negresses, each holding a bowl and feeding the woman and the husband.10

  In paradise men wear seventy costumes, which change colour seventy times an hour. Their faces are reflected in the faces of their wives and similarly the faces of the wives are reflected in those of their husbands. There are no beards and the only hair on the body is that of the eyelashes, eyelids and hair on the head.

  One grows more beautiful with every day. One’s appetite increases a hundredfold. One eats and drinks to one’s heart’s content. Man’s sexual potency is also multiplied. One makes love as on earth but each climax is extended and extended and lasts for twenty-four years. . . .

  According to Suyūti the houris are at the lawful disposal of the Elect, ‘each Chosen One will marry seventy houris, besides the lawful wives that he married on earth, and each of them has an appetizing sex’.11 Their bodies are so diaphanous, so transparent that ‘one can see the bones through the flesh and the marrow through the bones, just as a drinker can see the ruby red of the wine through the clearness of crystal’.12

  ‘Whenever one sleeps with a houri,’ Suyūti adds, ‘one finds her a virgin. Indeed the penis of the Chosen One never slackens. The erection is eternal. To each coitus corresponds a pleasure, a delicious sensation, so incredible in this vile world that if one experienced it one would faint.’13

  This pleasure is experienced not only with the houris. Earthly couples will also know the pleasures of heavenly love when they sleep with one another. They will become young again and eternally beautiful and purified. There will be no urine, no wind, no defecation, no sperm, no menstrua and men will often hear their earthly wives say: ‘By the power of God, I could find nothing in paradise as beautiful as you!’14

  Of course the sensual delights are not exclusive, or the only ones to be found in Paradise. Other, more spiritual pleasures are reserved for those who will be capable of attaining them. Suyūti, with his decidedly fertile imagination, describes for us a discussion that takes place in paradise.15 God presides over the Assembly of the Elect on a throne carved out of a red hyacinth, ‘a thousand years high’ and raised above the seat reserved for the prophets by one step. Each of these prophets takes up his place at the appropriate degree. Muhammad takes his place on the degree of mediation (darajat al-wasīla).

  Then come the pious men, the pure, the sincere, the friends of God, the martyrs of the faith, the saints, and all the nations and men who people paradise. All take their places on the mounds of musk and amber. A herald then calls out: ‘Abraham! Come and preach to your people.’ Abraham the Khali, the friend of God, rises and recites from beginning to end the sacred texts that were revealed to him. Then he returns to his place. A highly placed herald then calls upon Moses, who says: ‘Here I am, ready, my God.’ He is then told: ‘Rise and preach to your people.’ Moses rises and reads the Tora from the first to the last line. Then the call of God is addressed to Jesus, so that he may preach to his people. Jesus rises and reads the Gospels from the beginning to the end, then goes and sits down. The herald who speaks in the name of God cries out: ‘O David, rise, go to the tribune and let my friends hear the ten chapters of your psalms.’ David rises and recites his psalms on ninety different tones. Everyone is entranced by David’s voice. Delighted, they weep with emotion, so enchanting is David’s voice. It is certainly worth ninety oboes! When the men recover and their ecstasy is calmed, God, may His glory be glorified, asks them: ‘Have you ever heard so beautiful a voice?’ ‘No, our God, we have never heard a more beautiful voice than that call coming from God the Most High.’ Then God in person says: ‘My friend, Muhammad, go up to the tribune and recite the Suras “Ta Ha”16 and “Ya Sin”.’17

  Muhammad reads the two Suras and his voice is seventy times more beautiful still than that of David, may Salvation be upon them. The people go into ecstasy and trance. But also the chairs on which they are sitting and the torches that decorate the throne go into ecstasy. And the angels, too, begin to sway with ecstasy. And also the houris and the ephebes of Paradise. Nothing that is animated is not moved to ecstasy by the voice of Muhammad, on whom may God spread His salvation and blessings.

  God then says: ‘You have heard the singing of my Prophets and My Messengers?’ ‘Yes, Lord.’ ‘Would you now like your God to read you something?’ ‘Great is our desire to hear.’ Then God recites the Sura ‘The All-Merciful’ (al-Raḥmān)18 . . . or, according to other traditions, the Sura ‘Cattle’ (al-An‘ām).19

  When the Elect hear the reading of the Truth, may His Glory be glorified, they lose consciousness. The angels are in ecstasy, as also are the veils, the palaces, the trees. The leaves of the trees applaud, the birds sing, the rivers become agitated. So strong is the ecstasy felt on hearing the Magnificent and All-Powerful recite. The enchanted Throne shakes, the Seat sways in wonder. Nothing in paradise remains indifferent or is not transported with compassion, with desire for God the Most High. . . .

  When the Elect and all other things recover from their ecstasy, God, may His glory be glorified, asks them: ‘Servants, does any desire still remain within you?’ ‘Yes, we have still to see Your August Face.’ God the Most High then orders Kurūb20 to draw a little the veil that separates him from his servants. A breeze then spreads and clothes begin to stir, faces become radiant, hearts are purified, bodies become happiness, horses begin to frolic, birds to sing. . . .

  Then God asks Kurūb to remove completely the divine veil that separates Him from his servants. Once the Holy Face is revealed He asks: ‘Who am I?’ ‘You are God.’ ‘Yes, I am God the Most High! I am Peace (salām) and you are the Muslims (muslimīn)! I am Faith (ma-man) and you are the believers (mu-minūn)! I am the Veil and you are the veiled! Here are My Words, listen to Them! Here is My Light, contemplate it! Here is My Face, look upon It!’

  The Elect then look upon the face of the Eternal Being, may His glory be glorified! They look upon it without hindrance. When the Light of Truth reaches them, their faces light up and remain for three hundred years transfixed before the Face of Truth, may His name be glorified, the only God, the Incomparable.21

  Considerable historical scholarship has revealed the analogies between Islamic traditions and certain Christian traditions. Tor Andrae, Ahrens, Grimme and more recently still Gaudefroy-Demombynes22 have shown the importance of a comparison between Muslim eschatology and the Hymns of Bishop Ephrem. Gaudefroy-Demombynes provides an admirable summary of the question in the following passage:

  The houris are of Iranian origin, but they were adopted by the legends of the peoples of the Near East, in particular by the Christians. I observe . . . a close similarity with the writings of Bishop Ephrem, which seem to have influenced Muhammad. ‘And when a man has lived in virginity, they will welcome him in their immaculate womb, since as a monk he has not fallen into the bed and womb of an earthly love.’ He will therefore also find eternal youth: ‘Think, old men, of paradise. When once its odour has refreshed you, its perfume made you young again, your wrinkles disappear in the beauty that then surrounds you.’ There is the example of Moses. No doubt, Ephrem adds, his pictures of paradise do not correspond in any way to reality; they hide joys quite different from those of this world and are not understood by the vulgar. . . . And Andrae shows, quite rightly, that these images were widespread in the popular beliefs of the East: the Jews reserved for the pious a stay on an earth of prodigious fertility, where every pleasure awaited them, including those of sexual relations.23

  For my part I am struck by the similarity between the quranic apocalypse and that of St John. One is inevitably reminded of the Quran when one reads
:

  Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it: from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done.24

  Nevertheless, one must insist on the specificity of the Islamic view, which is of a psycho-sociological and, of course, theological order, and not a historical one. We owe it to ourselves, whatever admiration we may feel for historical scholarship, to observe that it is not after all the presence or absence of a theme in both writings, belonging to two divergent traditions, that will bring them together! It is at the very heart of these traditions, and of the world views that they imply and the values that they transmit that we must place ourselves.

  Of course Christianity has worked out a cosmology of the afterlife and a precise topography of the celestial world. Certain Fathers of the Church were even pleased to develop a vision of paradise for themselves in which it is difficult to know whether dream or imagination predominates. The Hymns of St Ephrem are a very fine example of this. In the Edenic-geography the various residences of the creatures are laid down on different levels from the depths of the valley to the top of the tree of-life. The Elect occupy different levels according to their degree of guilt – or sanctity. But in spite of everything this is a mere ‘system of representation’, in Cardinal Daniélou’s words.25

  With remarkable continuity, Islam has given so total, so detailed a vision of the afterlife that it constitutes a veritable credo. St Matthew, on the other hand, gives us the very essence of the Gospel view of man’s future life by reducing it to a mystery. The Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, tried to embarrass Jesus by saying to him:

  ‘Teacher, Moses said, “If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.” Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.’ But Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.’26

  In other words, the Christian will be a-sexual in paradise, whereas the Muslim will experience infinite orgasm.

  This is because for the Christian survival after death forms part of the mystery of Christ. It is essentially unknowable. The response of the Gospel is that the hereafter cannot be an object here of knowledge or imagination. Cardinal Daniélou provides an admirable and, it would seem, authoritative summary of the Catholic point of view when he declares:

  Christ took possession of that life beyond death. One of the most admirable phrases I know in the Gospels is when Christ, after the Last Supper, is talking to his Apostles, who are saddened at the thought of his death, and says: ‘I go to prepare a place for you,’ and elsewhere: ‘I shall come so that where I shall be, you will be with me. . . .’ All our response concerning the afterlife is here: Christ has taken possession of it and he asks us one thing: to deliver up to him everything that concerns that mysterious world, which is indeed no longer mysterious since it is no more than He himself.27

  So there is nothing more to be said about the afterlife except that it will be the resurrection in Jesus Christ. The last word in Christianity, if one may put it in this way, is ultimately no more than a question mark.

  I do not believe that this is ultimately a position radically different from that of Judaism. Of course Jewish exegesis also involves a set of eschatological notions such as the judgment of the soul (the Hebraic Kadish), which lasts for a year. Nevertheless the happiness in the afterlife described by the Bible applies only to Messianic times. And the future world remains ultimately unknowable. As an authority in the field, Rabbi Josy Eisenberg, puts it:

  All we may know of the future happiness of mankind or of the times of apocalypse refers to the messianic period, but in this world. As for the beatitudes, no one can describe them, and the most precise text, if I may so put it after saying that, is a text of the Talmud that is practically the only text we possess concerning the Jewish belief in survival, and which says: ‘In the future world there is no eating, no drinking, no procreation, no commerce, no jealousy, no hate, no competition, but the just are seated, their diadems on their heads, and enjoy the brightness of the divine presence.’ Something is promised, but that something is hidden from us.28

  We see how far we are therefore from Islamic attitudes. Islam has certainly taken over old traditions. But the psychological content that it gives to the notions of resurrection, paradise and hell is radically different. Owing to a failure of understanding on their part, certain orientalists have indulged in fictitious speculations on these questions. A materialistic Islam is contrasted with a spiritual, de-realized Christianity. Gaudefroy-Demombynes himself does not avoid this danger. He writes: ‘It is certainly a paradise for bedouins. No more burning sun, no cold, “shade and springs”, “orchards and arbors”, etc.; rich robes, jewels; boy servants. They will be in luxurious tents or palaces.’29 And Gaudefroy-Demombynes, carried away by the enthusiasm of his ‘demonstration’, denies that the vision of God is possible in Islam: ‘There is nothing to prove,’ he writes, ‘that the blessed will see the face of God.’30 And a little later: ‘The average orthodox doctrine admits that the blessed will enjoy the view of the face of Allah, but they give up trying to explain how that would be possible, bila Kayfa.’31

  Louis Gardet writes: ‘The definition of eternal beatitude, then, is not God himself.’32 Certainly Louis Gardet is sufficiently well versed in Islamology to know that the vision of God is confirmed in a quranic text33 that has been the object of innumerable exegeses. But that does not stop him declaring: ‘Despite these lines of approach, one cannot see it however as the equivalent of the “beatific vision” in the Christian sense of the term. To begin with this paradisiacal “vision” is intermittent, linked to God’s “appearances”. Moreover it remains “spectacular”, as Louis Massenet puts it, not transforming and beatific.’34

  Once again it is Fakhruddin Razi who gives us the most condensed, most significant commentary:

  Earthly pleasure may be divided into three categories: to satisfy a desire, to appease anger or the illusory pleasure obtained by money or others’ esteem. All this is derisory, for the animal, too, experiences one or other of these pleasures. The supreme good of which God speaks here is radically different from these low pleasures. It could only be the soul impregnated with holy spirituality, adorned by his glorious divine presence.35

  In fact it is my impression that the vision of God constitutes the very essence of the delights of the Muslim paradise. But it is not exclusive. It is like an extension of the other, as it were physical, delights promised to the Elect. The difficulties encountered by non-Muslims in understanding are hardly surprising, for they amount in one way or another to the co-extensiveness of the sexual and the sacral. From the Christian point of view, for example, it is unthinkable that the working of the flesh, a source of original sin, could find its place in the hereafter. The redemption of man was obtained at the price of a renunciation of sensuality, whose mission is at most earthly. For Islam, on the other hand, there is something essential in Eros. The original couple disobeyed, of course, but their sin was paid for more than enough by the expulsion from Eden. Earthly existence, with all its trials and tribulations, is more than enough to reduce them. Hence that sense of responsibility felt by the man who has to account for his acts and who, having proved by a just, exemplary life that he is essentially a good man, finds himself in paradise.

  To be in paradise, then, is the fulfillment of self. This fulfillment can be realized only in love conceived, as I have constantly poin
ted out, as a transfiguration, a transcendence of self in others. It is no accident that hell is solitude, non-presence of others, in a word, absence of love. Paradise, on the other hand, is total, full, infinite love. It is unity in harmony with the world, with oneself and with God.

  Paradise is first of all a reconciliation of man with nature, that is to say, with matter. Hence that material profusion that characterizes Janna. It is a feast of all the senses. In an earlier chapter we saw the role attributed to the look in the Islamic view of sexuality. Now sight, which is at the very heart of existence, is also an integral part of the human essence. So everything begins with the look and everything ends with it. Is it not the look that gives the houris their very name. To see and to be seen, to contemplate, to look, that is a form of happiness. Pleasure is ocular. Hence that precious luminosity. Hyacinths and gold, diamonds and topazes, pearls and emeralds, sapphires and corals form a unique palate for the Chosen One. These precious stones that make up paradise act in a mystical way like the pearl in which Arab alchemy is fond of recognizing, as a substitute for the purest sperm, metaphysical and magical qualities. It has, according to Abshīhi, the rare virtues ‘of rejoicing the heart, dilating the soul, embellishing the face, purifying the blood of the heart’.36

  Smell, too, has its part to play in this feast of the senses. For the exhalations of paradise are of musk, ginger, amber and form the very ground of Eden and the bodies of the houris. With the gaze, and perhaps even more so, perfume is a quasi-immaterial pleasure of matter itself. Hence all that therapeutics through scent so dear to the Arab tradition.37 And Abshīhi has Galen say: ‘Musk fortifies the heart, amber the brain, camphor the lungs, aloes-wood the stomach, ghāliya38 dissipates head colds, sandalwood tumours.’39